Spis punktów szlaku

The idea of exploring the city

The experience of participation and the resultant emotional relationship does not always translate into the ability to perceive the aesthetic values of space surrounding the residents of Tychy. After all, not everyone has to be an expert in architectural history. However, it is worth learning something about and to look at the buildings erected in one’s own city with understanding. It often happens that we pass various buildings in everyday life and we cease to notice their beauty, an unusual solution, an interesting façade decoration, such as a mosaic (and there are many such places in the city). We get used to them as to something obvious and natural. Sometimes architectural values cannot be seen due to façade of the building that turned to grey and still waits for renovation.

But the estates and individual objects of Tychy were designed by eminent architects, who received numerous awards for their designs and their implementation. During the construction of the city new technological and design solutions were devised and implemented. Subsequent estates were built according to the changing concepts of urban planning: from the conscious references to traditional small-town arrangements with peripheral development (frontages along the streets and squares, as in estates “A”, “B” and “C”) to the modernist solutions, consistent with the spirit of modern design common in Europe since the turn of 1950s and 1960s.

Residents of Tychy do not have to be embarrassed and say that their city was a “socialist” creation - they can invite guests to visit Tychy as a classic textbook example of post-war architecture development. Such a trip may be particularly attractive to people from the cities where buildings praised by experts as an excellent example of such architecture were recently recklessly ruined.

In order to facilitate the tour, the tourist route “From Socialist Realism to Postmodernism. The unique New Tychy” was prepared. Buildings included in the route were selected during the debate amongst the employees of the Tychy Municipal Museum, which since its founding has been documenting the history of the construction of the city. All the archival and some contemporary photographs were taken from the collection of the museum.

The route runs through almost all the housing estates of Tychy - from “A” to “Z”. It must be pointed that the idea of naming of estates with successive letters of the alphabet originated on the drawing boards of the designers. The housing estates were marked with letters on the draft general plan of the city, as well as during their construction. With these letters, the first addresses were recorded, even before street names were established. That technical label started to be commonly used by residents of Tychy - and so has remained. Convenience and economy of language turned out to be decisive. For this reason later attempts to change the naming of the districts/estates did not catch on. The proposed system of names in the form of female names starting with the same letters as the existing designation of the estates (A for Anna, B for Barbara, ..., Z - Zuzanna), was faintly fixed in the minds of the residents of Tychy. Today only a few names are used, such as Karolina for the “K” estate or Balbina for a new complex built in the vicinity of the Barbara estate.